Back in 2013 I played (and reviewed) a remake of Double Dragon II, a game upon which I’d wasted endless quarters in my youth. It was dreadful. I’d anticipated a fun little blast of nostalgia, but the controls were unbearable, the graphics abhorrent, and the ugly, misogynistic story was just the pits. To top it all off, the game suffered seizure-inducing stutter and its bonus mode was just plain broken.

After playing I decided that some games have a time and a place. And the time and place for Double Dragon was 1988 in a crappy arcade filled with game cabinets marked by the burns of cigarettes that older players rested on the edges of machines while they played.

But it seems I’m a glutton for punishment.

We’re now in 2017, and I just willingly subjected myself to Double Dragon IV, the first true sequel the series has seen in decades. And by true I don’t just mean numerically and narratively, but also in terms of design. Having purchased the franchise’s rights, Japanese studio Arc System Works set about making a game that would have felt perfectly at home in 1990. From visual presentation to interface, it’s not just an homage to brawlers of a bygone era; it could blend in seamlessly were it to travel to the past.

Being a player of a certain age, all of this sounded pretty great to me…until I actually played it.

Arc System Works

The first couple of minutes were lovely. I was jazzed when I landed on the title screen, where I found retro sprite characters that looked exactly as I remembered them. Better still, the Double Dragon theme was blasting. It sounded a smidgeon less rudimentary than in the original series, but you can switch the score to the original chiptune style in the settings menu – which I immediately did.

I figured I was good and ready to beat up some gangsters. But before the action came a bit of requisite stage-setting via some retro pixel art and simple narrative text. I was reintroduced to familiar fraternal heroes Billy and Jimmy Lee – masters of the deadly art of Sosetsuken. They start the game driving through the desert, ruminating on the sorts of stuff American martial arts heroes do, but end up getting pushed off the road by a mysterious car loaded with thugs. Cue combat. And, alas, a pretty quick turn for the worse.

The fighting is, as far as I can tell, almost identical to what I remember of the original Double Dragon games. But it’s no fun at all. It turns out the side-scrolling brawling action that engaged me for hours on end as a kid just doesn’t do it for grown-up me. Not even a little. And it isn’t hard to figure out why.

Billy and Jimmy have access to a healthy range of moves beyond basic punches and kicks. They can elbow enemies, knee them in the face, and even throw head butts. But getting them into exactly the right position to perform these moves proved horribly frustrating. It requires a sense (which I once had but have long since forgotten) of exactly how far above or below your character foes need to be in order to make contact with them. If you misjudge you’ll have no opportunity to correct mid-attack. You’ll just throw punches at the air, unable to move, and your enemy will patiently wait – frozen in place just a little higher or lower than you on the side-scrolling plane – until your attack stops, at which point he or she will casually clobber you.

Arc System Works

But even worse than the combat is the platforming. Out of what would seem to be a sense of blind love of the past, the developers created several sequences in which players are forced to jump across crevices or leap from one moving sidewalk to another over boiling hot metal. These were always the worst parts of the original games, due mostly to controls that were stiff and clunky beyond belief. And those controls have been perfectly recreated in Double Dragon IV. Probably half of my deaths were due to just falling off a cliff.

This wouldn’t be quite so frustrating if it didn’t use up a valuable life. See, unlike the arcade games, which at least allowed you to keep stuffing quarters into the machine out of sheer rage until you won, Double Dragon IV provides players with just five credits. Once they’re gone it’s game over and back to the start. It’s not a particularly long game, but after expending all my lives by the 8th or 9th mission three times in a row, I’d lost all interest in trying again.

Which is why I can’t provide a hands-on analysis of the bonus Tower mode, in which players are given one life (and their choice of playable character, including enemies unlocked in the story mode) to punch and kick their way through 100 floors of progressively challenging villains. Not that I’m particularly sad to have missed the opportunity. After spending a couple of hours with Double Dragon IV, I’ve no intention of ever loading it up again.

Arc System Works

Here’s the thing: Arc System Works fundamentally misunderstands nostalgia. The way I see it, our interest in the passions of our youth can be satisfied in a couple of ways. The first – and simplest – is simply to re-experience the thing we loved exactly as it was. Like watching an old episode of Star Trek. It’s easy to forgive the flaws because you know them and expect them and to a degree even enjoy them. The second – and this is a bit harder – is to identify and extract elements of what we loved about something old and strategically insert them into something modern. This is what Korean studio Gravity tried to do with its Double Dragon II remake, and failed miserably.

Arc System Works did neither of these things. Instead, they created the sequel they wished they could have played back in 1990, disregarding everything that’s happened in the world of games over the last quarter century. The result is a game that has neither the deep, soothing familiarity that would have come from a simple port of the original Double Dragon, nor the benefits of a game that combines the look and feel of the past with a modern interface with which contemporary audiences would feel more comfortable.

It is, in other words, a great big mess of a game. And one that you should make every reasonable attempt to avoid. Double Dragon IV serves as an inelegant reminder that sometimes the past is better left in the past.